Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: — | Date: December 13, 2020 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Father, we thank you for the privilege that we enjoy to come together, and we’re grateful for the privilege of it. It is a delight each week to meet together with your people. We ask that you would be with us again, and that your Spirit would minister your word to us. Give us a greater appreciation and a clearer understanding of the doctrine of Christ and of his glory. Through that, a greater appreciation of our salvation.

Pastor, did you forget your mic again? Oh, yes. I had it on this time. It’s progress.

Colossians chapter 1, verses 15 to 20 especially, those verses are packed with implications with regard to the Trinity, with regard to the doctrine of Christ, and we’ve spent a good bit of time on it. And in doing that, I took some time to go aside and appeal to one of the creeds, the Chalcedonian Creed. Last week, I told you some of the story with that. I think two weeks ago or three, whatever it was, we actually looked at the creed itself. Last week, I started telling some stories about it. And it somehow popped into my mind late last Sunday evening. I think I conflated a couple of the events. I think I told you the story of good old St. Nicholas slapping Arius at the council. That was actually at the Council of Nicaea. I had the Chalcedon Creed on the brain, and I think I said the other.

But anyway, I started talking about, thinking about that. And I thought, well, why don’t we take an aside this morning, and probably next time, and look at the idea of creeds in the early church. And if that sounds too stuffy, please hang in there with me. I think you will appreciate it. I think you’ll enjoy seeing what went on to the building of these creeds and why they were important. So that’s what we’re going to look at this morning. If you don’t have one of these handouts, raise your hand. We’ll make sure that you get it. And then you can turn to 1 John chapter 5. Keep Colossians 1:15 and following in your mind, and some of the things that set us off into this. I’m going to branch out just a little bit to deepen our understanding of these doctrines.

1 John 5, verse 1. I’ll make sure you all are there first. All right, 1 John 5, verse 1: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God. And everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of Him.” Notice the first half of the verse. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.” The thing I want to point out here is notice that little formula, “who believes that.” That points to the content of our belief. This appears in John a couple of times and then some equivalent kind of expressions appear in 1 John as well. There’s a certain content that must be in our faith for it to be saving faith. Saving faith is more than that. Saving faith is trust in Christ, reliance upon Him. But that trust in Christ must have a certain content to it.

And a few occasions in John’s first epistle, he points out some of the content of that faith. And here, “whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ,” that’s what we must believe, that He is the Messiah. Whoever believes that has been born of God. Now that’s not a full and complete list of what’s necessary to believe, but it is a necessary point. Verse 5, 1 John 5:5: “Who is he that overcomes the world except the one that believes that?” There’s that formula again. “The one that believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” So it’s a recognition of his messiahship, recognition of his deity, and who he is.

Let’s look at some related ones in 1 John. Look at 1 John 2. Someone read verses 22 and 23. 1 John 2:22-23: “Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the Antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.” All right, notice a couple of—one equivalent expression here and one contrasting expression. Here, the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ, well, he’s not of God, he’s an Antichrist. But then we have the other equivalent expression: we confess that Jesus is the Christ. There’s more of the content of what must be believed in order to be saved. Someone look at chapter 4 and verse 3, 1 John 4:3. All right, again, highlighting of what is necessary to be believed. And then one more, 2 John, verse 7. Anybody? “For many deceivers have gone out into the world… Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.” All right, again, confessing that—what? That Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. And there it seems to have in the background another heresy, and that is the ancient heresy of Docetism, those who said that Jesus only appeared to be a man; he wasn’t really in the flesh. There are lots of legends about Jesus that he appeared to be a man, but he really wasn’t. He was just God. John seems to be having—he seems to have that in the back of his mind.

The Idea Of Creeds In The Early Church

Our point here is just to show that Christianity is grounded in a body of truths that have been revealed and that must be believed in order to be saved. Again, saving faith is more than that. Saving faith is trust. But there is a content to the faith that we must have. And it is of first importance for Christians to say, “I believe that,” and then we spell out what we believe.

Now, just to give you the broader background to that of divine revelation: In Hebrews chapter one, the statement is made, God at various times in various ways spoke to us by the fathers in all these different ways throughout the centuries. But in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son. And then He gives the qualification, He’s the brightness of the Father’s glory and so on. But there’s this climactic-ness of the revelation that came in Christ. That’s what we read in the Gospel of John, chapter one. In the beginning was the Word. So Jesus is called the Word because he is God speaking, God making himself known. And all through the Gospel of John, we’re reminded that whatever Jesus does, that’s God making himself known. Whatever Jesus says, that’s God making himself known. He’s the Word, God’s expression, God making himself known. It climaxes in verse 18 of the prologue, John chapter 1: no one has seen God at any time, because God is invisible, but the only begotten Son who’s in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. He’s brought Him out. He’s revealed Him. He’s the Word. He’s God speaking.

And then we have the corollary to that, particularly in the Gospel of John, but elsewhere as well, that Jesus then deposits that full revelation into the trust of the apostles. In John 14 to 16, in several different places, Jesus emphasizes that he will send the Holy Spirit. And his emphasis in those chapters is not to us, although there are many implications that come to us. His focus in those passages is the Apostles. He’ll send the Holy Spirit so that through the Spirit, Christ’s revelation will come to the Apostles. And so they have it from Christ by means of the Spirit. And then in turn, the Apostles give us that fullness of revelation in the writings that they give us, the writings of the New Testament. So we have the climax of revelation in Christ deposited for us in the New Testament Scriptures.

This is the whole idea of apostolic authority. They speak for Christ. They are Christ revealing himself to us. When Paul says, for example, “When I speak to you, I speak by the word of the Lord,” or “When you read this, you obey it and obey the Lord,” and “If you disobey this, you’re disobedient to Christ,” they claim an apostolic authority; that is, they speak for Christ, they’re his ambassadors. Christ has come, a fullness of revelation given to the apostles by means of the Spirit, and that in turn given to the church and to the world.

And so we have what you’ve heard me call many times—it’s a terrible expression, but I don’t know a better way to make it plain—we have this “revelation dump” in the first century. Christ has come, we have this fullness of revelation from God, and it’s given to us, deposited. In fact, that’s one of the words Paul uses in 1 Timothy 6, verse 20: “Hold fast to the deposit,” that which is entrusted to you. You have other equivalent expressions: “the faith, once for all delivered to the saints.” That’s this deposit that’s been given to the church. And so we have this, for lack of a better term, a revelation dump that’s been given to us. And it’s just a massive amount of information and truths that must be explored and increasingly understood.

A Standard For Sound Teaching

Now then, picture yourself in that first century. As the apostles died off, the church recognized the need to preserve definitively what Christ has given to us by his apostles. The first item, of course, is the New Testament canon, and that was recognized as it—I was going to say, came off the press—as it came from the pen, but of course, not every church had every letter or book that was written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and so on. And so as these circulated, and were copied and circulated, they recognized the canon.

But during that time, already, they’re trying to—and we have record of this in the early centuries, even in the first century itself and in the second century—records of Christians laboring to preserve this body of truth that has been revealed in Christ. The earliest record we have of it is what you may have heard of, the Didache. That is actually a first-century document written by Christians, crystallizing the teaching of Christ, the teaching of the New Testament.

There is a hint of that kind of notion of preserving the faith; there’s a hint of that in the pastoral epistles when Paul commands Timothy to teach what is sound doctrine. What is sound doctrine? Well, there’s some standard of truth that Timothy is to understand and you’re to teach that. And in fact, Timothy and Titus are commanded to contradict and to refute and to correct those who contradict sound doctrine. So there’s this notion already of a body of teaching that has been revealed and it is the Christian’s, the church’s, responsibility to keep that and to preserve it and to articulate it.

So increasingly in the early church, there’s this recognition of a need of a standard for sound teaching. The teaching of the apostles, of course, is primary, and so what we need to recognize first is which books come from the apostles, and that’s our canon. But beginning almost immediately in the earliest centuries, we begin finding reference to “the rule of faith.” That’s the expression: the rule of faith. And that is a compact summary of Christian teaching, the rule of faith. We have reference to it in Justin in about 150 AD, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and some others as well.

And often it developed as a discipleship kind of thing when people would make profession of faith. The baptismal candidate, called a catechumen, would go through a period of catechesis, catechetical instruction, when it comes to baptism. “Christian, do you believe in God the Father Almighty?” “Yes, I do.” “Christian, do you believe in…” and there would be these items of the rule of faith that they had to acknowledge. Sometimes it would be just, “Christian, what do you believe?” and they would recite, “This is what we believe. I believe in God the Father Almighty,” and so on.

We have an interesting record of that in Hippolytus. This is about 220. He recounts that he would ask the baptismal candidates, “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty? Do you believe in Messiah Jesus, the Son of God, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, who was crucified in the days of Pontius Pilate and died and rose the third day living from the dead and ascended into the heavens and sat down at the right hand of the Father and will come to judge the living and the dead? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, in the Holy Church and the resurrection of the faith?” That’s the rule of faith. Now, there are various forms of that rule of faith in various locations in the early centuries, but that content was pretty stable. And that, of course, is the forerunner of what we know as the Apostles’ Creed that we recite here at RBC. That’s been going on for nearly 20 centuries.

Well, I have some more of that to read to you, but I don’t think I’d better take the time. It’s already gone longer than I thought in this introductory part. But those kinds of things have a ring of a summary of Christian doctrine, a rule of faith, a standard that we can hold to and measure against other kinds of claims. We have that in other early Christian writers, various kinds that I’ll have to skip through.

Now there is a hint of that already in the New Testament. And one of them is in the pastoral epistles. You remember the “faithful sayings”? The faithful sayings—”This is a faithful saying.” So most famously, 1 Timothy 1:15: “This is a faithful saying deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” And then Paul adds, “of whom I am chief.” This is a faithful saying that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. This is a phrase, an expression, a clause that was already in well use and Paul could refer to it as a faithful saying that they are already familiar with. So already there are standardized kinds of expressions of faith coming to be in use even in the New Testament times.

Another passage in the pastoral epistles that reflects this is 2 Timothy 1:13, where Paul says, “Follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me.” That expression, “the pattern of sound words,” or the King James, which I really prefer in this verse, “Hold fast to the form of sound words.” There’s some kind of standardized rule that everything else taught should be measured against. We have, I think, maybe a hint of this in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul says, “I’m preaching the gospel which you have received, which I also have received.” That expression, “to be received,” that’s tradition. That’s what tradition is in the New Testament.

In 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 15, Paul says, “Hold fast to the tradition that you have heard from me, whether in our preaching or by this epistle, hold fast to the tradition.” Now we, especially Baptists, have a suspicion against tradition, and that’s a good suspicion, but there is one kind of tradition we ought to hold to vigorously. That is that tradition that was handed down from the Father through the Son through the Spirit to the Apostles and deposited into the trust of the Church. That tradition is all authoritative. And Paul says, “That’s what I’ve received, that’s what you have received,” and then 1 Corinthians 15, verses 3 and 4 have something of a creedal tone already to it. Here’s the gospel: “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” Kind of a creedal tone to it; it’s a summary statement of what we believe.

Romans chapter 10, verses 9 and 10 might reflect that as well. There Paul gives us two propositions that must be believed in order to be saved. You must confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord. Secondly, believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead. Well, you have other expressions: “the doctrine that you’ve been taught,” “hold fast the trustworthy word that you’ve been taught,” “that which you’ve heard from me pass on to others,” Paul says to Timothy. And then you have passages like Colossians chapter one that we’ve been looking at, Philippians chapter two, that seem like previously crafted summary statements of what Christians believe.

Built in to the Christian practice prescribed in the New Testament itself are two formulas that were designed not only for our memory and for our instruction, but preserving and articulating basic truths of the scriptures: “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” repeated all through the centuries by Christians at their baptism. And there’s an articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. “Baptize them into the name”—that name of God, one name, not three—one name of God, the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, distributed three ways, equally sharing in the given name, the name of God. There’s another expression, kind of a formula, and that is at the Lord’s table. “This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for the remission of sins,” an articulation of the doctrine of the atonement. So you have something of that notion already in the New Testament of an attempt to throw up a standard, a summary statement of what Christians believe and must believe.

Orthodoxy And Heresy

Well, eventually, the church recognized the need to state those beliefs that are essential with further precision in a way to standardize it all. In fact, by the way, the word “creed” is just the Latin word credo, which means “I believe.” It’s a Latin term: “I believe.” Creed: “I believe.” And so we have in the creeds then, developing early, these fixed formulas summarizing essential articles of the faith. And they’re not just fixed formulas summarizing the expressions of faith, but they’re fixed formulas that have enjoyed wide ecclesiastical sanction, widely recognized.

And so we have the first seven ecumenical councils they’re called—universal is what the word ecumenical means—universal councils where Christians from all over the empire came together and hammered out these statements of faith and they were officially sanctioned, and these creeds are acknowledged by Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and so on. They’re also called—creeds are also called “symbols,” which is an interesting expression. It comes from the Latin symbolon, which has the idea of two pieces side by side put together. So picture a tapestry that’s cut. Two pieces, they come together, and they match perfectly. That’s the idea of a creed or a symbol. Here’s the New Testament. Here’s the standard. Here’s a summary statement of the faith, and it matches. That’s what a creed is supposed to do. That’s why they are called symbols.

And so these creeds have been used for, as I said, catechetical instruction for baptismal candidates. They’ve been used throughout the centuries liturgically, as we do it here at RBC, reciting the Apostles’ Creed. They’re also used for formal instruction in any other venue. But they’re brief statements that everyone can learn and that way the church can be united in a common faith. Now the Apostles’ Creed that we recite here was the first creed to gain wide acceptance. That Apostles’ Creed was not written by the apostles, but it’s the Apostles’ Creed because it summarizes apostolic teaching. And in fact, the apostolic creed was not endorsed officially by any official council of the churches, although much of the language was picked up. But again, the Apostles’ Creed grew out of preparing baptismal candidates, teaching them what must be believed in order to be saved, and they confess it at their baptism.

Well, inevitably, more was needed. There needed to be closer definitions. And that’s something we see already in the New Testament as well. You can say, “I believe in God,” and that’s good. But at some point, we need to define: what do you mean by God? Or you can say, “I believe in Jesus.” That’s great too, but what do you mean by Jesus? And if you think I’m being overly persnickety about that, that’s exactly what the Apostle Paul does in 2 Corinthians chapter 11. They are preaching Jesus, but it’s “another Jesus.” It’s not the Jesus I preach to you. Same in Galatians. You can say, “I believe the gospel.” That’s great, but at some point you’ve got to define: what is the gospel?

And so these creeds became necessary to articulate what is it exactly that we believe and what do we mean by that. And in the course of the decades and the centuries after the apostles, differing ideas arose about what we mean by God and Christ and so on. And they were competing for adherence and for a hearing, and so the Christians were forced to examine the scriptures and then provide an exact summary statement of the church’s faith. And I think that’s just as the New Testament itself requires.

The upshot of that is what we call the ecumenical creeds. Two terms here to keep in mind that you have to understand: orthodoxy and heresy. Orthodoxy: right teaching, that which is right. Heresy: that which contradicts what is right. There’s reflection of that idea in the New Testament. Paul speaks of “rightly dividing the word of truth.” The implication plainly is there’s a wrong way to divide the word of truth. Again, the pastoral epistles speaking of false teaching; those who contradict that need to be rebuked and corrected and so on. All of that presupposes a right and a wrong understanding of the scriptures and its teaching. So the apostles are recognized as the authority, but sometimes they’re misunderstood. And so we have to throw up some kind of rule of faith, a summary statement to state what we mean when we say, “I believe that.” And eventually that gives way to the formulation of the creeds.

The idea of a creed is grounded in the conviction that God has spoken and that the words have meaning and that we have a message to give to the world. Now you might wonder, the first creed doesn’t come up till 325, the Council of Nicaea. You might wonder why it took so long for the church to articulate a formal creed like that. And I think the answer is: when you’re living under persecution, you don’t have that luxury. It’s adherence to Christ and adherence to the scriptures, and that has to suffice for now. That doesn’t mean that every Christian was always under persecution in the Roman Empire. It’s not the case. But it is the case that any Christian was subject to persecution at any time under the Roman Empire. And there would be flare-ups of it here and there.

So in effort to formalize a creed or confession, those efforts primarily concentrate in two different eras in the history of the church. There’s the patristic era, the era of the so-called church fathers. That’s about 100 to 500 AD. And then we have the Reformation era in the 16th and 17th century. There is a bit of a difference between those two eras. The early ones we tend to call creeds. The Reformation era we tend to call confessions of faith. The creeds tend to be briefer, maybe a couple dozen lines, rarely more than that. Confessions are much more in-depth. Creeds address the very basics of the faith: the Trinity, the nature of Christ, and so on. Confessions of faith at the Reformation era, they touch everything. The creeds are then universal. Eastern Orthodox hold to them—at least some of them—the Roman Catholics hold to them, Protestants hold to them—some of them. These are universally recognized. But the confessions of faith—well, you’ve got Roman Catholic confessions of faith, you’ve got Reformed confessions of faith, Lutheran confessions of faith, Anglican confessions of faith, Baptist confessions of faith, Methodist. And they articulate further doctrines building on the creeds and articulate their distinctive understandings of scripture.

In the early church, we have seven ecumenical councils. We have Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381. We have Ephesus in 431, Chalcedon in 451, second council of Constantinople in 553, the third council of Constantinople in 680, and then the second council of Nicaea in 787. The Eastern Orthodox Church recognizes only those seven. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes all those seven plus 14 more. There’s 21 of them, the last of which being Second Vatican Council in 1962-63. The Coptic Church in Egypt recognizes only the first three of these councils because it rejects the idea of the two natures of Christ. Protestants generally recognize, at least at a confessional level, officially recognize only the first four of those councils. Those councils then produced, of those four, one creed—the Nicene Creed—and then the Chalcedonian Creed is a bit of a misnomer. It’s actually a definition, “the Chalcedonian definition,” which is given to define the Nicene Creed into some more particulars that we’ll see.

All right, all of that is background material to it. The first article of faith that’s taken up in the creeds is the most basic, and that is the nature of God. God is triune. Specifically at issue is the identity of God the Son. Again, you have to appreciate the historical situation. We are monotheists. We believe in one God. This God sent his Son and we worship him too. How does that work out if there is just one God and now there’s two? Or wait, there’s three: there’s the Holy Spirit. That’s got to be hammered out. What do we mean by that? Is that just nonsense? Or is there some way to understand it more particularly? That was the first issue that had to be taken up in the creeds.

From Jesus and the apostles, Christian understanding of God as triune was just part of the Christian consciousness. It was not challenged. And there are New Testament essentials to it that you can find in the New Testament. We’ll do that another time to see there’s just part and parcel of their thinking. And that was unchallenged in the earliest centuries. Christ was worshipped. Christ is called Lord, Christ is called God, Christ is spoken of as eternal. There are hymns of praise to Christ that are written in the early centuries. I have one here; I won’t take time to read it now, praising the eternality and the greatness and the glory of Christ. And we have others writing to that effect as well.

So this idea of a triune God is there in the early centuries, but how do we articulate that? And then add to that: while that was unchallenged in the early centuries, there were some trajectories in some Christian teaching that, taken further, will end up in conflict with the doctrine of the Trinity. So for example, Origen, the third-century theologian—brilliant theologian, brilliant scholar, brilliant student of the scriptures—but he taught that Jesus was eternal, the Son, not just Jesus, that God the Son was eternally subordinate to God the Father. Still acknowledged as deity, but he’s eternally subordinate. Well, you go very far with that at all, and you end up with two different ones who are being worshipped, and they are not the same at all.

And sure enough, fourth century, we have this man by the name of Arius. He was a presbyter in Alexandria. He acknowledged the full humanity of Jesus, but he vigorously opposed the idea of the full deity of Jesus. His concern was to protect monotheism, and he wanted to oppose, on the one hand, polytheism; he also wanted to oppose what was known as Sabellianism or modalism, the idea that there’s one God who’s one person, but he wears three different hats and not actually three persons—one person, he wears three hats and different functions. And he wanted to oppose both polytheism and Sabellianism. And he further reasoned that since God is immutable, he can’t change; therefore, he can’t become incarnate. And he certainly can’t suffer. And so we can’t say, he argued, that Jesus is fully God.

And there’s somewhat something so slippery about his language because he would refer to Jesus as God. He would refer to him as divine, but not in the fullest sense that he would speak of the Father as divine. Jesus was a “lesser God” of some kind, he taught. He was God’s first created being. That was key to it: the first created being. He was not eternal. And so he would take the expression that we saw last time, homoiousios, of a “similar nature” to God, but he would not say homoousios, the “same nature” as God. It was a popular jingle, I think I told you in that day. There was when he was not. There was when he was not. This is in Christendom. This is a Christian empire. So you’ve got to imagine this. He’s wildly popular. And people are in the streets chanting, “There was when he was not. There was when he was not.” You have what amounts to just rank heresy with regard to the person of Christ. It’s becoming wildly popular.

By the way, Ligonier Ministries this year did one of their famous theological surveys. I forget the numbers, don’t hold me to this, but it was something like “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not fully God” was one of the questions—true or false. And a staggering number of professing evangelicals said “true.” “Christ was the first created being, but not fully God.” Staggering number of evangelicals say that’s right. I was talking to a theologian friend of mine the other day. We were talking about that, and I just said, “What in the world are evangelical pastors doing?” His response was really pretty good: “They’re preaching social justice.” Well, they’re certainly not expounding the glories of Christ. That many people would never say that.

Well, Arius was opposed by Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria. He was also opposed by the famous Athanasius, who at the time was a deacon, not a bishop. He later became a bishop. But he was a deacon at the time. Deacons need to know theology as well. And his argument was—well, there are many fronts. But one of the couple of the major focuses of his argument was: only God can be worshiped. And you worship Christ, right? So you’re guilty of idolatry if he is not fully God. It’s a powerful argument. Another argument is: only God can save. If Jesus is not fully God, then he can’t save us. We don’t have a savior if he is not fully God. Well, these are some of the theological arguments that he was using.

Well, the emperor Constantine was asked to help settle the dispute. He needed that in order to preserve unity in his empire. This is Christendom. And so he summoned the council at Nicaea in 325 AD. Expenses paid for all who were invited to come. The number of men who came to the council is not certain, but it’s somewhere around 300. 318 is one of the numbers. 295, I think, is one of the numbers, but right around 300 came and Constantine had the state pay their expenses in coming. They then in turn met, hammered out these issues, and produced what we have now as the Nicene Creed.

Nicene Creed 325

Now keep in mind this creed—you have it on your paper in front of you. Notice it’s the Nicene Creed 325. Actually, the Nicene Creed was expanded at Constantinople in 381, and that’s the Nicene Creed that we use today. But first of all, let’s look at what they wrote in 325.

“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father. God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth, who because of us men and because of our salvation came down and became incarnate and became man and suffered and rose again on the third day and ascended to the heavens and will come to judge the living and the dead and in the Holy Spirit.”

And then after that, there’s a number of anathemas that follow. We’ll notice in this creed the focus is the heresy of Arianism, and so it clarifies that there are two natures. He is God as well as man. He is both divine and human. And also this—you’ll notice, since you’re familiar with the Apostles’ Creed, it expands the Apostles’ Creed by asserting the relationship—and this was crucial to the creed—the relationship of the Son and the Father. What is that relationship? So it affirms its deity, the Son’s deity. He is one Lord, Jesus Christ.

And then we have the expression “begotten of the Father.” But then notice “begotten, not made.” That was aimed directly at Arius. “Christ was the first created being.” And Nicene theologians said, “No, he was not created. He was eternally begotten by the Father.” Whatever that means. And they left some mystery to that. And there is a mystery to that. How do you have begotten and eternal? But you’re left with that, with the language of the New Testament. It’s part of the mystery of the Trinity.

So we have the emphasis on the Son’s relational derivation from the Father. And that’s this business of God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten from God. You’ve got to grapple with that language in the New Testament. Christ the Son is begotten of the Father. Never do you see the Father begotten by the Son. Christ is the image of the Father. Never do you see the Father is the image of the Son. The Son is the effulgence of the Father’s light. Never do you see that the Father is the effulgence of the Son’s light. There’s always that direction of derivation, of relational dependence. And yet, it’s eternal. And “begotten” is important because it is the same nature that is begotten. Like begets like. He’s not created. That would make him something else. He’s begotten of the Father. He is of the same substance as the Father. And so you have this “from, from, from” language: God from God, light from light, true God from true God. This is the eternal relations of the persons of the Trinity. The word was the taxis, the order of relations.

And then that all-important word, which was the chief contribution of Nicaea: homoousios, “of one substance with the Father.” That again was aimed right at Arius. Jesus, the Son, has the same glory as the Father. Whatever it is to be God, the Son is that. Absolutely. And then notice that expression, “who because of us men and because of our salvation, came down.” Not necessarily speaking in spatial terms. This is the idea that only God can save. You can’t work yourself up. And if Jesus is a created being, he can’t take us up either. Only as God comes down to us can we be brought up. That’s the language of “he came down.” Only God can save. So it’s again an emphasis on the deity of Christ. And that’s one of the driving arguments both in 325 and in 381 with regard to the Holy Spirit at Constantinople: only God can save. And that argues effectively that both the Son and the Spirit are fully God.

Well, this is enormously important. Everything else about Christianity hinges on this. How do we understand God? How do we understand salvation? How do we understand worship? And so the Nicene Creed, as you can see, was very important to throw up this standard: what we mean when we say we believe in Jesus Christ. He is God come to save. And we mean to say that in the fullest sense of the term. He is God come to save.

We still have to hammer out: how then do you relate these two natures of Jesus, human and divine? That’ll finally get done at Chalcedon, and we’ll see that next time. Years following Nicaea, there was much controversy and unrest. Although Athanasius, the side of Orthodoxy, won, Arius was still very popular and there was a lot of conflict back and forth. And in fact, Athanasius himself was exiled five times and brought back before all of this was finally settled. But this was an important moment, extremely important moment in the history of the Church, giving to us what Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Protestants of all stripes have recognized. This is a definitive statement of what it is for God to be triune.

All right, we’re out of time. Any questions quickly? All right, I want to wrap this up next time and bring it through the others. I hope you can see the value and the importance of it. Let’s bow for prayer. Pastor Greg, would you pray for us, please?

“Thank you for this wonderful view of the truths of your word, especially as it became captured by the early church in order to preserve apostolic revelation and in order to be guardians of the truth against falsehood and deceivers. We pray that we would be true children of the apostles and the Reformation and to carry on the legacy of both preserving and defending the truth in our generation.”